Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/251



PON a naked, blasted heath, where neither tree nor bush could live, so barren was it in its bleakness, three witches, gray, crooked, and misshapen, hovered round a boiling, bubbling caldron. The fire crackled under the huge vessel, from whose blazing depths came forth a vile and sickening odor. The edge was lurid with sulphurous flames, which gleamed upon the horrid faces of the unclean hags who tended it; lighting up in ghastly vividness their skinny arms, their sharp faces, fringed with grizzled, scattering hairs, which looked like beards, and showing more plainly than the light of day their eyes,staring and blood-colored, yet expressionless as the faces of the dead.

The thunder pealed dully in the sky, and the rain fell in fine drops, each one of which seemed to pierce the clothing to the skin, as if it were a point of steel. Amid the rain and wind these strange beings moved slowly round and round the caldrons edge, uttering their weird